How to protect against members posting spam?

ColdAsIce

ColdAsIce

ColdAsIce

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Joined
26 May 2006
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Edinburgh
Just recently setup my own phpbb forum. Today I have had 3 new signups posting advertising crap. What is the best way to protect against this?
 
usually in the backend of phpbb, they allow turning on of captch as far as I remember.
 
ColdAsIce said:
Pretty sure captcha is already turned on :( does that mean someone is physically signing up to post this crap?
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No, captchas aren't foolproof. They will reduce the amount of spam you get, but won't eliminate it completely.

Does phpBB have an option to require new members to be approved before they can post? If so, turn that on. You'll still have to deal with the spam, but at least it won't go public before you do.
 
The graphic captchas are rubbish. Re-Captcha even more so.

Enable the Q&A option, and set up a few questions, and change them every couple of months.

When I did this, it basically stopped spam overnight.
 
Confused said:
The graphic captchas are rubbish. Re-Captcha even more so.

Enable the Q&A option, and set up a few questions, and change them every couple of months.

When I did this, it basically stopped spam overnight.
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Nice idea will look to set this up.

For the moment I have made new members go into the newly registered members group. From here they are new members until after their first post.

That first post has to be approved by a moderator before posting.

Thanks everyone.
 
have you tried mollom? I think you should be able to get it for phpbb. We ran it on our forum and the spam stopped ,then we just delete the spam accounts each morning. Captcha stuff is pretty uselesss with the bots.
 
Just to update, I changed to the Q&A and used questions such as pick the 1st, middle and last letter from this word: I would then create a completely made up word with no spaced.

Since then no bot signups. Thanks guys.
 
q: why is captcha etc useless? surely bots are not able to read the captcha phrases or am i missing something?
 
ilcp said:
q: why is captcha etc useless? surely bots are not able to read the captcha phrases or am i missing something?
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Some captchas are too easy and bots can read them. (If you see a captcha that looks "too easy", ie. you can instantly decipher it without any thought, chances are a computer can do it too!)

Also, some bots use humans to do it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA#Human_solvers
 
tbh the only really effective solution is a custom captcha/security implementation (I modified the create account page on mine with invisible fields that if filled out = automatic rejection but it still only filters out 60-70% of the spam bots) - I tried various off the shelf captchas and wasn't long before the spam bots were breezing past them like they weren't even there - I have it so accounts require approval before being activated but get dozens of spam accounts signed up per day.
 
Are they posting actual 'crap' or are they simply linking to affiliate based content? If the latter then you can re-affiliate their links and earn commission instead of them taking commission with a service like YieldKit.
 
yhack said:
I see what you did there.
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I tried to solve a problem. Albeit I threw in a company name, but what I suggested is true and that is one benefit of YieldKit. Affiliate spam is removed, or atleast transfered to the publisher so any profit made from a link goes to the site that hosted it, not the individual who spammed.
 
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